Stream Your Home PC to Your Dorm

If your gaming PC stays home when you leave for college, you don't have to stop playing. Stream it to your laptop instead. The home GPU does the work and the laptop just shows the picture. It's free, and it works from anywhere.

What you need

• Sunshine (on the home PC). An open-source streaming server that runs as a background service and uses your GPU's hardware encoder (NVENC/AMF), so it barely touches the CPU.
• Moonlight (on the laptop). The open-source client. Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, even Chromebooks.
• Tailscale (on both). A private encrypted network between your devices. Your PC gets a stable 100.x.x.x address you can reach from any network. Free for personal use.
• A Wi-Fi smart plug (optional). Lets you power the PC on from your phone.

Setup

1. Install Sunshine on the home PC. The installer sets it up as a Windows service, so it starts on boot with no login needed.
2. Install Tailscale on both devices and run tailscale up on each. They'll each get a static 100.x.x.x IP.
3. Set the BIOS for remote boot. Enter BIOS (usually DEL or F2 at startup), find "Restore on AC Power Loss," and turn it on. Now when the smart plug restores power, the PC boots by itself.
4. Install Moonlight on the laptop. Add the PC by its Tailscale IP and pair with the PIN Sunshine shows.
5. Connect and play. Pick Desktop or a specific game. Stream at 1080p60 or 4K60 depending on your connection.

SSH for when something breaks

With Tailscale plus SSH enabled on the PC, you can fix things from a terminal without a stream at all:

# Connect from anywhere
ssh your-user@100.x.x.x

# See what's running
tasklist | findstr "game"

# Restart Sunshine if it's acting up
net stop sunshinesvc && net start sunshinesvc

# Shut down when you're done
shutdown /s /t 0

What to expect

• Latency: about 15–30ms total on good 5GHz Wi-Fi. Fine for everything except competitive shooters.
• Bandwidth: roughly 30 Mbps for 1080p60 and 80 Mbps for 4K60. Most dorm Wi-Fi handles 1080p.
• Controllers: plug one into the laptop and Moonlight forwards it. Xbox, PS5, and generic controllers all work.
• Multiple monitors: Sunshine streams one. Pick it in the Sunshine web UI at localhost:47990.
• Power: a gaming PC idles around 60W, and playing remotely draws the same as playing locally. Shut it down over SSH when you're done.

Or let Claude walk you through it

If you'd rather not do this by hand, ask Claude Code to do it with you:

claude "Help me set up Moonlight + Sunshine game streaming to my college laptop"

It'll go through the Sunshine install, Tailscale on both machines, the BIOS setting, testing the connection, and troubleshooting.